Things are changing in Dundee’s Hilltown. Four multi-story blocks that form a familiar silhouette on the skyline will soon be demolished, greating a gap where homes once overlooked the Tay. A year-long project by a Dundee creative arts charity is aiming to capture the spirit of the area during this transition, Jennifer Cosgrove discovered.
Ten years ago, the charity Pure Media UK (PMUK) was established in Dundee, with the aim of enabling people to unlock potential and realise the fullness of life through creativity and the arts.
For seven years it has been based at The Workshop in the Hilltown and its work has spanned the world, with recent projects in China, South Africa and India.
PMUK promotes creativity to generate respect, self-confidence, inclusiveness, partnership, social enterprise and community and has seen a generation of young people grow up with this inspiration who are now feeding this back into communities.
One of these people is Layla Brown, a 24-year-old musician from Arbroath who became involved in PMUK as a teenager.
After graduating from university Layla returned and is now the charity’s creative director.
She said, “I was first involved in PMUK when I was 15 and I was a young musician. They use to have this festival called the Ultimate Chill which was a battle of the bands in Dundee and we had bands from all over Scotland performing.
“I got involved and I was offered amazing opportunities as a young musician and opportunities to record in studios.”New generationShe added, “After that, I went to study classical music in Leeds and when I was at university I got a real interest in working in community music and working with people who didn’t have the same opportunities as me.
“During the time I spent my summers from university getting involved with PMUK and after my final summer I planned to move back to Leeds but Chika Inatimi asked me if I would be interested in working full-time for PMUK and taking on the role as creative director.”
Chika Inatimi is a founding member of PMUK and plays an active role in the charity while encouraging new talent.
He said, “Layla was part of a generation of young people we had been working with and a few of them came back with skills and new ideas and energy and we didn’t know exactly what we’d done until that happened and we realised these were amazing people.
“There’s been a generational shift and there is a new generation of leaders who are defining their creative experiences and expressions in the community.”
PMUK has now embarked upon a year-long project called Changing Faces Of The Hilltown, something Chika says was born from the planned demolition of the Alexander Street multis.
He said, “It is the multis coming down that stimulated all this work because I think what’s happened is people have become really open and there are all connections happening that otherwise wouldn’t because the physical environment has been altered.”
Changing Faces Of Hilltown is inspired by the area’s radical transformation and aims to build relationships with the various communities in and around Hilltown by getting to know their stories.
These stories will then feed into creative activities including a film project based on dialogue with shopkeepers in the area, an arts project, an after-school project and a theatre project that celebrate the diverse culture of Hilltown.
The charity will work with everyone from primary children to those in homes for the elderly and with a diverse range of ethnic groups in the area.’Real heart’Layla said, “It’s an opportunity to work with people. I think we’ve got a real heart for people in everything that we do and all the people I have every worked with at PMUK tend to be that way.
“Our motto is ‘Life Is Big, Be All That You Can Be’ because we believe everybody has the right to a fuller life.”
Another reason PMUK has chosen to work in the Hilltown is that it has never carried out charity work of this kind on its own doorstep.
Having worked with people and communities around the UK and the globe, it is now feeding 10 years of experience back into the place it calls home.
Layla said, “A lot of the work of the work we do is quite organic. We have visions of what we want to do at the start of the year and a few conversations happened in the Hilltown and all the arrows pointed to a project like this.
“When we started to think about it, everything began to fall into place. It really underpins all of our values and it’s also really important because we’ve hit our 10-year anniversary.”
Last week, volunteers gathered at The Workshop to launch the project, which is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and Dundee Regeneration Fund.
They went out into the community armed with clipboards and audio recording equipment, searching for people to tell their stories of the area. There was an enthusiastic response, with many fascinating insights into Hilltown life.
There were tales of a close-knit community, where everyone knows everyone, memories of a once-vibrant hub with lots of great shops and stories of the sad loss of the Hilltown shops and the grievance that is still keenly felt.Reaching out to different culturesAfterwards, the PMUK volunteers created art inspired by what they’d been told and last Friday, the work was presented to the Hilltown community, through outdoor exhibitions, interactive art and photographs displayed on the windows of The Workshop and neighbouring business Diaosu.
Locals also expressed their ideas and hopes for Hilltown on The Workshop window.
Judging by the public response to the event so far, the project has really caught people’s imagination. Layla says there have already been requests to get involved in what looks to be an exciting year of events.
This week, the charity has been running Dancerama at SS Peter & Paul RC Primary School in Dundee, which is a drama and dance workshop based on the stories that have been told by local people.
Layla said, “We want to reach out to all different cultures and gather stories which can often be hidden. Conversation is very important but people can also hand in ‘written’ stories to us.
“It’s all about forming a relationship. We want people to trust us and become aware of what we are doing.
“We want The Workshop to be accessible and for people to feel they can stop in and have a chat.”
For more information about Pure Media UK visit its website or drop into The Workshop at 205-207 Hilltown.